The Grandmaster's Gambit

8. What It Hunts

[Day-1 (20:30)]

(The Foundry Yard, Sector 8, Alexandria)

By half past eight the yard had one light and a pecking order.

The light was Tobin. He sat on an upturned crucible against the north wall with his sleeves pulled down to the knuckles. The orange came through the cloth anyway, the way a lamp shows through a curtain. It reached ten feet and no further. Past that the slag was black.

Kai had walked the edges while there was still a bit of daylight, and he kept the map in his head. A cold furnace shed ran along the north wall. A heap of iron bars lay by the east wall. Beside it a pipe as thick as a thigh came out of the ground and climbed the brick, hissing gently at a valve. A rusted lever stood next to the valve. In the middle of the yard lay a flat stone slab, four feet across, with an iron ring set in its face. When Kestrel stepped on it, it boomed like a drum.

"Old water tank," Wick had said. "Dry since the foundry shut. Goes down nine feet, maybe ten."

"And that?" Kai had asked, about the pipe.

"That's the main. Still live. Hear it?" Kestrel had tapped the pipe. "Don't touch the lever."

He'd already put a hand on it and pulled it away.

The pecking order had arranged itself without a vote. Wick had the shed. He had opened its padlock in six seconds and was now reporting its contents to nobody. Tongs. Iron bars. Forty sacks of moulding sand. An oak pattern beam as long as a boat.

Ysolde had the baby and the dry corner by the shed door, and the others sat in rings around her, by how much they trusted the dark. Kestrel had the gate. Nobody had given it to him. He stood at it and watched the old man, and every time Tobin moved, Kestrel's head turned with him.

Kai had the barricade. That was his own fault. He had said the gate wanted a proper brace, and then everyone had looked at him.

They had built it in an hour. Sandbags two high behind the slag cart. The oak beam wedged at an angle against the leaves, with its foot hooked through the iron ring in the slab. Two people held the foot in place, the ferryman because he was heavy and the seamstress because she had asked to. It looked like something that would work.

Every four minutes the Hunter came to the gate. Kai had timed it against his own pulse. A dragging step in the lane, a long pause, and then the voice, low and flat as a stone on a stone.

"Wait."

After that the step went away, and the lane filled with the sound of it being gone.

At twenty to nine the Weepers came.

There were seven of them. They did not run, and they made no sound, which was worse than shouting. They hit the leaves together. The cart rode back a foot. The beam took the weight, and for three seconds Kai thought, with a small cold pleasure, that he had been right.

The gate was iron. The brick it hung from was older than the iron.

The top hinge tore out of the wall in a puff of red dust. The right-hand leaf folded in from the top like a page being turned. It came down across the cart, the sandbags, the beam, and the two people holding the beam's foot.

The sound was short.

Then the Weepers were over it. They climbed the fallen iron as if it were a stair, and they did not look down at what was under it. They did not look at anyone. They crossed the yard in a straight line toward the north wall. Ysolde stood in the line with the baby against her chest, rooted. The first Weeper stepped round her the way a man steps round a puddle.

Kai saw it. He put it away. There was no time to do anything else with it.

Tobin was on his feet. He shoved his sleeves to the elbow, and the yard lit orange to the walls. Fire stood out of his hands like a sheet hung on a line. It filled the gap in the gate, and the first three Weepers entered it and did not come out as Weepers. He kept his palms in the flame. His face was calm and his hands were not shaking, and Kai smelled something that was not lentils and not slag.

*He can't feel it. He is cooking his own hands.*

The fire thinned. Two Weepers came through it smoking, and the nearer reached for Tobin's throat. Kai stepped into its path. He had no plan for that. It did not strike him. It put out one arm and moved him, the way a man moves a chair he has no interest in. Kai crossed six feet of slag and hit the sandbags with his back. His ribs spoke up all at once.

Kestrel's bar came down on the Weeper's spine from behind. The second fell to the same iron and a second swing. Then it was quiet, except for the pipe.

Seven Weepers lay in the yard. Tobin looked at his hands. The skin on both palms had gone the colour of grease and was rising in blisters, and the orange under his arms had dwindled to a thread. He sat down on the crucible, slowly, and said nothing.

It took Kestrel, Kai and three others to lift the leaf. Nobody spoke. Under it the ferryman's oilskin had gone dark. The seamstress's pincushion had burst, and her pins lay scattered over the slag, bright in Tobin's dying light. They laid the two of them in the shed.

*I told them where to stand.* He did not try to close that one. He did not think it would close.

Through the gap, forty yards up the lane, the Hunter was dragging itself back to the lane mouth from its latest visit. It had not come in during the fight. It had not even stepped over the threshold. Kai sat on the sandbags, holding his ribs. He went back over the last ten minutes, because going back over things was the part of him that still worked.

*Seven of these creatures passed nine of us to get to one man. One of them stepped around a woman with a baby. It doesn't seem like any human counts as food to them. It moved me aside and didn't even look at my face.*

He had seen the same thing before. A Weeper had passed a woman with a pram at the Rest. At the Line the crowd had been packed shoulder to shoulder, and the Weepers had come through it with their faces turned toward every glowing wrist. On Weaver's Lane a Weeper had run past two men crouched behind a cart to get to a man whose arm was lit like a lantern.

*They hunt whatever Tobin has that the rest of us don't.*

He thought of Kestrel's words on Ring Road. *It follows the smoke.* He had not seen any smoke. That did not mean there was none.

The baby woke and cried, thin and furious. Forty yards away, the Hunter's head did not move. When Tobin shifted on the crucible a minute later, to ease his hands, the great wet face turned a few degrees toward the yard, as a sunflower turns.

Kai stood up.

"Where are you going?" said Kestrel.

"To check something."

"Check what?"

"Whether I'm right."

A street's worth of watching and one frightened man's saying were hearsay. He wanted it from arm's length, with his own skin in it, before anyone bet a life on it.

He walked through the gap. His body wanted to stay behind the wall, and he overrode it, one step at a time. The lane was dark and cold, and the amber lamps made the cobbles brown. He stopped ten paces up and put his back against the brick. Then he waited for the fourth minute.

The dragging step began at the lane mouth. It grew. Kai watched it come down the middle of the lane. Nine feet of wet umber plate, with one leg that no longer bent. The smell reached him first: damp stone, and under it a sourness like a cellar. His body told him to run. He did not.

It passed him at arm's length. The shut eyes did not open. The weeping face stayed pointed at the glow in the yard, and the great head did not turn a degree for the man against the wall. It reached the gap in the gate. "Wait," it said to Tobin, who stood in the yard beyond. Then it turned around and dragged its ruined leg back past Kai, heading up the lane again.

He walked back. His knees did not forgive him until he reached the sandbags.

"You've got nothing on you, kid," said Tobin, watching him come. His voice was raw. "Clean as a plate. I've been looking at you this last hour."

"At what?"

"The smoke. You can't see it, can you? Only our sort can." He lifted a blistered hand an inch, as if showing a chimney. "Mine stands up out of me like a flue. Coal-coloured. It's been lit since four o'clock, and that thing has been walking round it for an hour. They don't hunt people. They hunt that."

"So it wants him," Kestrel said.

No one answered.

"It wants him," Kestrel said again. He had not moved from the gate. His goggles hung round his neck, and his burnt hands opened and closed. "And it'll stay until it gets him. So give it him. A few of us and a baby. One of him."

"Kestrel," said Ysolde.

"Don't. I'm not saying it's nice. I've got a wife. He's sixty-eight and his hands are cooked. It takes him and goes, and the rest of us walk out. That's the sum."

"Rampart's coming," said Wick. His voice cracked. "Class Three. It's in the book. They send a breach team in twenty minutes."

"The book's five hours old," said Kestrel.

Kai said nothing, because he had already run the sum. He had run it while Kestrel was still looking for the words. One life against theirs, including the baby, and the Hunter would leave a dead plume as it had left a dead Enforcer. The numbers balanced. It balanced every time he checked, and he hated that it balanced, and he hated more that his mind had done it without being asked.

"Nobody pushes me," said Tobin.

He had stood up. The effort cost him something, and he did not let it show. The thread of orange under his arms flickered once and held.

"I'll tell you how this goes," he said. "I'm not for pushing, and I'm not for dying in a ditch so the rest of you can feel clean about it. I walk. On my own feet, to where I choose. And before I light so much as a wick, someone tells me the plan. All of it. With the odds."

He was not looking at Kestrel. He was looking at Kai.

"I don't have one," Kai said.

"Then get one. I've got until my hands stop being able to hold a flame." He turned a blistered palm up in the dark. "Forty years I lit lamps for people who never looked up. I'm not particular. But I'll be looked at, boy, by somebody, before I go."

"You may burn," Kai said. It was the truth, and it was the only thing he had that Tobin had asked for. "I'll tell you the odds when I have them. They won't be good."

"Good," said Tobin. "I'd not trust good."

Kai walked into the middle of the yard.

He looked at it as he would have looked at a position set up by someone else. The Hunter was the heavy piece. It was slow and strong, and it wanted one thing. Tobin's glow was the queen, the only piece on the board it would cross the whole board to take. The gap in the gate was an open file with nothing on it. And between the file and the queen, set in the slag where a man would have to walk, lay a flat stone slab that boomed underfoot.

He put his boot on the slab. The sound went down and down into the dark, and took a long time to come back.

Behind him the old man began to unscrew his cane. It came apart at the brass collars into three pieces. He fitted them together again into a pole nine feet long with a hook at the tip, as he had done every evening of his working life.

"Light nothing yet," Kai said. He began to count paces.